Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16Index and Navigate Source Code with ctags

ctags is an external program that scans through a codebase and generates an index of keywords. It was originally built into Vim, but with the release of Vim version 6, ctags became a separate project. That heritage is evident today in Vim’s tight integration with ctags.

Vim’s ctags support allows us to navigate around a codebase by quickly jumping to definitions of functions and classes. We’ll see how in Tip 104. As a secondary benefit, we can also use the output from ctags to generate a word list for autocompletion, as we’ll see in ​Tag Files​.

Tag navigation and tag autocompletion won’t work unless Vim knows where to look for an up-to-date index file. Tip 103, shows how to configure ...